Advance praise for The History of White People:

“Deeply researched, intelligent, and wonderfully common-sensical, this is a ground-breaking book, and if we’re ever going to get to that so- called ‘post-racial’ society, a necessary book. It locates race where it actually exists, inside our heads, and shows us how recently it came to reside there.”—Russell Banks, author of The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction

“In this wide-ranging and passionate book, Nell Painter makes the story of American history into something new. Her array of writers, artists, and politicians, some familiar and some surprising, struggle mightily to create a concept many Americans of all backgrounds now take for granted: ‘white people.’ ”—Edward Ayers, author of In the Presence of Mine Enemies

“The History of White People is a brilliant meditation on the invention of the idea of ‘whiteness.’ Deeply researched and elegantly written, Painter’s presentation will certainly spark conversation and controversy—as it should. Painter’s high-octane intelligence makes her perfectly suited to the task.”—Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello

“Nell Painter’s The History of White People is an amazing race-bending narrative. With grace and energy, she confronts the myth of white people as race-less. She offers an eye-opening examination of slavery, the creation of white-ness, and the way in which racial categories have been both false and destructive. This is story-telling at its best.”—Ellen Goodman, syndicated columnist, Washington Post Writers Group

“Not since Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man has there been such a synoptically provocative appreciation of the myths by which a now demographically challenged people sustained themselves and restrained others.”—David Levering Lewis, professor of history, New York University Abu Dhabi, and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of W. E. B. Du Bois, 1868–1919: Biography of a Race